Dr Karma Chávez: The Precariousness of Homonationalism: The Queer Agency of Terrorism in Post-9/11 Media Discourse
Date: 16 May 2012, 4.15pm
Location: The Philip Taylor Cinema – ICS Cinema (Room 2.31)
A Research Seminar jointly hosted by ICS/Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
Dr Karma Chávez, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Arts and affiliate faculty of Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
After the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, people from across the political spectrum offered explanations for the terrorists’ motivations and searched for where to place the blame. Figures that featured centrally in the Cold War such as the “homosexual-communist-subversive” would re-emerge in new forms in the discourse of this burgeoning War on Terror, including the racialized figure of the “queer-immigrant-terrorist.” This paper analyzes media discourse of two kinds that responded to the attacks. First, I examine conservative media commentary that blamed Representative Barney Frank (Democrat – 4th District, Massachusetts) and his “gay agenda” for the attacks due to Frank’s influential role in passing the 1990 Immigration Act, which ended many ideological exclusions as well as homosexual exclusion in U.S. immigration law. Second, I explore how conservative and mainstream media reports and commentaries constructed lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta as “queer”-either as effeminate, as homosexual, as sexually-depraved, or as a repressed misogynist-and how this (racialized and culturally-specific) queerness is argued to be his primary motivation for the attacks. In reading these two kinds of discourse in relation to each other, I argue that “queerness” becomes the agency of terrorism, and reveal how in certain kinds of discourse, this maps onto even the most “homonormative,” white, gay bodies.
Karma R. Chávez writes and researches on social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics using woman-of-color feminist and queer perspectives. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (SUNY Press, 2013, with Cindy Griffin). Her book manuscript, Queer/Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, is currently under review. Chávez is the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network, with Eithne Luibhéid.